Somerville Toy Camera Fest features fantabulous photos

By Beth Hunter, Correspondent

Thursday

Sep 6, 2018 at 10:53 AMSep 6, 2018 at 5:51 PM

Cheap plastic cameras that were once given out as carnival prizes - like the Diana and Holga cameras - have achieved a kind of cult status for photographers exhibiting in the Somerville Toy Camera Festival Sept. 6-Oct. 13. Oddly, the cheaply made and poorly designed cameras are prized for the interesting effects caused by their manufacturing flaws.

These days, people carry computers in their pockets capable of creating images that are sharply focused, well lit and instantly accessible.

The images that will be displayed in the Somerville Toy Camera Festival Sept. 6 through Oct. 13 are nearly the opposite of that. One of the largest toy camera exhibits in the world, the festival features simultaneous exhibits at Brickbottom Gallery, Nave Gallery and Washington Street Gallery.

Now in its sixth year, the annual event includes workshops, demonstrations and artist talks. The Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester and the Photographic Resource Center in Cambridge will also participate this year.

Toy cameras are all plastic, including the lenses, and they have limited exposure control. About the size of your hand, they are much smaller and lighter than most of the bulky cameras of the 1960s. They frequently leak light which can result in unusual light flares, halos and darkening of the edges of the frame.

After each shot, the film must be manually advanced so making a double exposure is easy enough. They can also produce dreamy, softly blurred images. The results tend to be unexpected and not reproducible.

Mary Kocal of Somerville is a fine art and editorial photographer whose photographs are in museum collections around the world. She will have two photos on exhibit at the Toy Camera Festival.

“There is an element of surprise with toy cameras,” Kocal said. “Part of the fun is you let go and have a little mystery. With digital, you take the picture, you look at the screen and you know you got the shot.”

“I work very intuitively. For me, personally, I feel it is a very poetic way of working, with the soft focus and the vignettes. The toy camera adds a surreal look … and it is one of the few cameras I have that still takes film,” said Kocol.

Kocol discovered the Diana camera back in graduate school at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. “I really fell in love with it … It’s very imperfect.” But there can be beauty in the imperfect.

An inexpensive, lightweight plastic camera manufactured in Hong Kong for export in the early 1960s, it originally sold for about 50 cents. Carnivals gave them out as prizes. In the 1980s another inexpensive, lightweight plastic camera, the Holga, was introduced. The Holga is similar but not identical to the Diana camera, and there have been many clones. In the 1990s an Austrian company began manufacturing the Lomo based on a Russian camera produced by a state-run factory.

Oddly, these cheaply made and poorly designed cameras ultimately gained cult status for the interesting effects caused by their manufacturing flaws. Kocol noted that today’s cell phone cameras can achieve some of the same effects through the use of Instagram filters.

“For me, it's wonderful that one can take a picture at all with something so simple as a plastic (toy) camera or even a pinhole in a darkened box,” Kocol said. “There's something unique and nostalgic about them, which allows creativity to bloom. Plus it reminds us of what happens when light strikes film.”

Artist Susan Berstler of Somerville, director of the Nave Gallery for a dozen years, said she started to notice several years ago that some of the pictures she found really intriguing were being made with toy cameras. That realization was the inception of the toy camera festival.

Somerville has a tightly knit arts community, and Berstler reached out to the directors of the Brickbottom Gallery and the Washington Street Gallery with her idea to develop a citywide festival.

“The community we have built has been just amazing,” Berstler said. “We have photographers who have shown as part of the toy camera festival from Poland, from Scotland; Canada is a big one. We have had photographers from Mexico, Italy and Columbia. It really is an international festival.”

“The last couple of years… I like to say that we are growing out of Somerville. We have collaborated with the Griffin Museum in Winchester as part of the toy camera festival,” Berstler said. “This year they will host a solo show with the juror of the festival, Jennifer Shaw. And the Photographic Resource Center in Cambridge, just 5 minutes from Somerville, will be doing [a talk at one of the galleries] as part of the festival as well.”

On exhibit at the three galleries will be more than 100 works from 70 different artists, all who have made pictures using toy cameras.

The juror for this year’s festival is Jennifer Shaw, a fine art photographer from New Orleans whose work exhibited widely and held in several museum collections. She almost exclusively uses toy cameras in her work.

“It’s great to see a community come together and collectively celebrate photography,” said Shaw. “Photography is the medium of our times. Thanks to cell phones we are all photographers now. I think for anyone who is interested in photography because of the accessibility of having it right at your fingertips, toy cameras can be a logical next jumping off point for them. Because they are so much fun and they are easy. They are free and they are fluid.

“For me, they feel more direct. They are able to translate my views and my feelings in a way that standard 35mm just didn’t. It is a very intuitive process because you don’t have to stop and think if your camera settings are right… It makes it very easy to quickly react to things when you are inspired,” Shaw said.

But is this fine art?

“It does not have to be some intensely technical process to qualify as fine art,” said Shaw. “It is really about your vision and what you are trying to say with the work. Plastic cameras are just another tool to help us get there.”

“The Space Between,” a solo exhibit of Shaw’s work, will be held at the Griffin Museum throughout the toy camera festival.

The best way to enjoy the festival is to visit all three galleries. Admission is free.

A longtime Somerville resident, Kocol added, ”Somerville is the perfect place for the toy camera festival because we have a long tradition of this city being very creative, having a lot of artists and a little bit of quirkiness to it. So the toy camera festival fits right in here.”